Networked Rhetorical Forms

The website my group choose to do our rhetorical analysis on is CNN. CNN stands for Cable News Network. CNN was founded by Ted Turner and 25 other members in 1980. CNN was originally a tv channel. CNN lasted from 1980-2003 on tv. In 9995 CNN was made into a website. The website attracted growing interest and is now one of the most popular news websites in the world. The widespread growth of blogs, social media and user-generated content have influenced the site.The website CNN helped us find the observations “(what)”, examples “(how)”, analysis “(why)” to rhetorical concepts. We figured out how to use the concepts and how not to use the concepts. The rhetorical concepts are audience, purpose, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.

“We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.” This quote was stated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of Coming to our Senses. Coming to our Senses was published in 2005. The main idea of Coming to our Sense is that our senses are limited and that we need technology to enhance it to better our world. Tyson is effective in delivering the main idea by using rhetorical devices found throughout his essay.

From a few seconds to respond to a friend’s text, countless hours spent gramming, snapchatting, tweeting, posting on Facebook, pinning on Pinterest, and many other forms of social media, teenagers today are non-stop connected to their phones, laptops, tablets, computers, etc., creating or strengthening social bonds. Your social identity is very important today, and the mount of friends you have on facebook, or amount of retweets or likes you get are a sign of your social superiority. This paper aims to evaluate Melissa Healy’s use of rhetorical strategies, such as ethos, pathos, and logos, in “Teenage social media butterflies may not be such a bad idea.” Healy uses rhetorical appeals effectively in her causal argument about adolescents and social relationships teenagers have that deal in result to social media.

LGBT representation is a touchy subject, and Amy is one of the few brave enough to explore the topic. However, she left more than a few holes in her argument, biting off more than she could chew. Her position on the misrepresentation of bisexuals in TV was ineffective at persuading her audience, because of her lack of concrete evidence, misdirection of audiences, and contradictory statements.

In his essay, “Navigating Genres”, Kerry Dirk describes rhetorical genres in funny layman’s terms which made me want to read more. Dirk states the obvious – that through everyday life, we are familiar with different rhetorical genres because we encounter and use them every day. We may not be conscious of it, but whenever we listen to a particular kind of song, or see a TV advertisement for a product we use, or hear a political commentator on the radio, we are being exposed to various rhetorical genres. When we see a horror flick, we are being exposed to another type. When we “post” on Facebook or Instagram, we are using a relatively new kind of genre which came about in response to the digital age.

This postcard builds suspense in the reader’s mind. Alex saying that this adventure could kill him makes the reader interested in finding out more. “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man.” (Krakauer 3).

Nonconformity allows people to go against a prevailing rule so that they may do as they please.

Many people wish they can drop everything important to them and isolate themselves from society; very few people will even attempt this, but Chris McCandless breaks societal norms to accomplish this goal. In Into the Wild, John Krakauer tells the story of this young man’s life to inspire the audience to chase their dreams through the use of logos, involved sentence, and anecdotes.

A prosecutor’s job is to find evidence to support his case against an individual accused of breaking the law while a defense attorney tries to present evidence to prove the innocence of the person accused. Neither can be truly be unbiased about their evidence but each of them is motivated to confirm a particular position. Much like a defense attorney, in his biography, Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer attempts to prove that McCandless’s tragedy was not due to his incompetence or lack of knowledge about the wild. He asserts emotions and rational onto McCandless’s experience as well as drawing similarities between his personal experience and McCandless’s in order to create a more sympathetic response from readers.

“The information you get from social media is not a substitute for academic discipline at all.” - Bill Nye

John Fire Lame Deer was a Sioux Indian tribal leader, medicine man, rodeo clown, and storyteller amongst other things. A selection from his autobiography Seeker Of Visions: The Life Of A Sioux Medicine Man titled “Talking to the Owls and Butterflies” is a short piece regarding nature and man’s relationship with it. The piece was intended to make an impression on white people in order to help salvage what is remaining in the environment. Lame Deer reprimands the “white world” for its negative outlook towards nature and the treatment of animals, he converses how man has changed and reshaped nature in order to make it more profitable. Stating that Caucasians have gone and altered animals in order to create

Elaborating a little further in the visual discourse of memes the analysis will expand on the traditional rhetorical theory which artifacts individually to construct the meaning. Traditionally, rhetoric is “considered to be public, contextual, and contingent” (Kenney, 2002, p. 54), and these three elements are represented in memes. The techniques of using an iconic images and intertextual references to create visual assumptions through manipulating texts is what lead the viewers to draw up a construction of the argument by cognitively making a connection to fill in the image’s unstated premise (Blair, 22 2004); the use of tropes such as metaphor or typed personas (Lewis, 2012) through the memes fill the rhetoric dialogism of irritation caused by the juxtaposition of incongruous images the brain must pause to understand (Stroupe,

The film Generation Like is quick to use ethos to establish the content's credibility. Within a few minutes of the film beginning, Douglas Rushkoff indicates his knowledge regarding the topic, "I've been speaking at events like this for more than twenty years now. I've written books and taught classes about this stuff, so people turn to me for answers. " As the film progresses, interviews and interactions with various adolescents are presented; using their stories to explain how companies utilize social media to market their products. By using adolescent's experience to explain the use of social media, the audience is able to better understand the functions of media from real life occurrences.

Every piece of writing (no matter what type or style) projects itself to its unique intended audience. The memes analyzed here have their own individual set of followers that are determined based on pathos, logos and ethos. The “Grumpy Cat” meme takes on its own set of fans, while the “Thanks, Obama” its own too, but a few amount of fans are present in both. They each share the Obama topic, so they both would share the anti-Obama fans, the advocates of previous presidents and the people that love the overall meme subject. On the contrary to what they both occupy, the meme about Hannah Montana has a wider variety of disciples because it will not only appeal to Miley and Hannah Montana groupies, but also people that grew up during the Hannah

The word ‘meme’ derived from a Greek word miméma which means “imitated”. Memes are very popular amongst Millennial and are used on daily basis. Memes helps to express our feelings on certain matters or situations that can be relatable with our daily life’s events. Meme is one of the most important units of todays cultural that symbolically transmit the idea from one person to another with the help of writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked form. Everyone nowadays is so familiar with memes. Memes are the interesting item of pictures or videos that spreads widely online especially through social media and called viral.